Topic: GPU

This week on the AppleInsider Podcast, William and Victor talk about Jony Ive leaving Apple, the possible removal of the Lightning port from iPhone, and Apple taking on a new hire to work on ARM processors... maybe for Macs?

AMD has launched three new cards in its Radeon RX 5000 range that all use 7-nanometer processes for the GPU, with the Radeon RX5700, XT, and 50th Anniversary Edition providing over 10 teraflops of performance as a more value-oriented alternative to the Vega cards.

We compared both models of Apple's late-released Vega 20-equipped MacBook Pros to help determine whether the performance gains warrant the extra cash needed to upgrade from the 2.6GHz i7 to the 2.9GHz i9

At its Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm outlined its new 855, a chip it hopes will power the next generation of premium Androids. It addresses silicon work Apple has driven in its Application Processors leading up to the latest A12 Bionic, but it's less clear who will be building high-end Androids with Qualcomm's most advanced processor yet, and for how long.

Apple has started to offer the 15-inch MacBook Pro to customers with updated graphics options, with configurations of the notebook using AMD's Radeon Pro Vega GPUs now available to purchase from Apple directly.

Nvidia has revealed its new Turing architecture for use in GPUs, one which boasts dedicated cores for use in ray tracing, and while consumer cards are yet to be announced, Quadro RTX Turing GPUs are already being touted for their ability to support real-time 8K video playback.

Intel has confirmed it intends to create its own discrete graphics processing chips by 2020, a move that opens up the possibility of Apple using discrete Intel GPUs across its laptop and desktop Mac lines.

Intel's latest processor launch is a collaboration with long-time rival AMD, with the two chip firms working together to create a pair of 8th generation Core processors that are equipped with Radeon RX Vega M graphics, with the onboard AMD GPU potentially helping with the creation of more powerful notebooks or small form-factor computers like the Mac mini that do not require a dedicated GPU.

Looking at late betas of Apple's eGPU support in High Sierra, Apple has come a long way, and has made some of the technology changes and fixes that it needs for widest possible adoption -- but it's not quite there yet for the entirety of the Mac user base.

A few of the external GPU solutions are aimed at the gamer crowd -- and look like it too. The Mantiz MZ-02 is one of a new generation of enclosures, aimed at boosting graphics performance with the addition of a PCI-E GPU to a Thunderbolt 3-equipped machine and eschewing any stereotypical gamer branding.

Apple has apparently taken issue with Imagination Technologies statements against it, and now says that the GPU maker knew that Apple was cutting back on its technologies since 2015, well before the public declaration in the spring.

As with the initial Radeon Pro release with the 2016 MacBook Pro, Apple hasn't provided that much detail on the same family of GPUs used in the new iMacs -- but AMD has shed some light on the new processors, showing a radical improvement over the predecessors.

Apple is building its own GPU architecture, but why? Rather than being motivated by simple cost savings, evidence points to the timing of a significant technical leap forward that could be as big of an advance as iOS was ten years ago.

Apple is ramping up its efforts to create its own GPU designs, following the iPhone producer's decision to stop working with the U.K.-based Imagination Technologies, by advertising a number of job postings within the graphics field in London.

On the heels of the 2013 Mac Pro price improvements, Nvidia has announced a brand new Titan Xp video card using the Pascal architecture, with a driver release coming soon allowing any Nvidia Pascal-based video cards to be installed in compatible older PCI-e Mac Pros.

Apple's plan to decisively migrate iOS to its own internally-developed GPU within the next two years obviously shocked Imagination Technologies, its current supplier of PowerVR graphics technology. It should also rattle Nvidia. Here's why.